


Rhythm Break

by Argyle



Category: Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-28
Updated: 2007-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-31 21:31:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/348562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argyle/pseuds/Argyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So tell me if you've heard this one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rhythm Break

So just give a shout if you’ve heard this one: a guy – let’s call him Danny – walks into a bar – well, it’s more a café – to meet an old friend. The friend looks like a Rusty, doesn’t he? Sometimes you can just tell.

Thing is, Danny has a plan. Rusty can see it written all over him. Hell, it might as well be tattooed on his forehead. It’s in the way he walks, self-assured and satisfied, and Rusty’s caught it all before. In fact, he’s caught it so often, and with such confounding regularity, that he’s considering selling the film rights. Hollywood loves a remake.

***

“Have you eaten yet?” Danny asks, and glances between Rusty’s half-empty coffee mug and Rusty’s half-open eyes. It’s nearly two in the morning, and save for a few truckers, a few tourists, and a few off-duty blackjack dealers, Deb’s All-Nite Diner is empty. The overhead fan clip-clop-clanks in time with the whirring fluorescent OPEN sign, and somewhere between the kitchen and the neighboring street, a transistor ekes out Supertramp.

There’s a crumb on Rusty’s chin.

“Are you buying?” he replies, a bit too languidly.

“Maybe.” Danny slides onto the opposite booth bench, and then begins to thumb through the menu. “Still like steak and eggs?”

Rusty shrugs. Of course he still likes steak and eggs, but Danny can’t resist the admittance. Knowing Rusty has its perks, and Danny knows Rusty’s not quite ready to get his back up. It’s the curiosity, not the potential for denial, which snares Rusty every time.

“Too early?”

“I’m fine with coffee.”

Danny arches a brow. “That’s a first.”

When Deb swings round to refill Rusty’s cup, Danny orders two full breakfasts: steak (rare and rare), eggs (scrambled and over-easy, extra-runny), hash browns, buttered toast (white and wheat), and crispy bacon. Sure, he’s buying. It seems only fair.

And then, later: “How’s Tess?” Rusty cuts a sliver of gristle from his steak before looking up. “I heard she’s—”

“What?” Danny asks.

“With Benedict,” says Rusty, and it’s the tact to look a little shamefaced which saves him. “I saw them getting into a car together the other night.”

Danny doesn’t expect an apology. Six months ago already, Tess had made her intentions perfectly clear. He tried to explain that a man can’t change on a dime. She’d laughed and laughed; he didn’t take off his wedding band. Now, it glints in the too-bright light like an artifact from a past civilization. All the riches of Eldorado wouldn’t have been so damning.

“She looked happy,” Rusty continues. “You know—” he munches down the crust of his toast “—well-adjusted.”

“How familiar are you with Fort Knox?” Danny asks.

***

Rusty moves like he has a story to tell.

In all the years Danny’s known him, this choreography hasn’t changed. Rising action, falling action. It begins with a hackneyed joke and ends with a side of, “Did I leave my boots under your bed?”

To which Danny replies, in so many words, “Fourth time this month. I’m thinking of dedicating a closet to them.”

But he’s not complaining. Rusty’s boot placement is well-earned, and it’s not as though he doesn’t come to collect them. He’s always there, standing in and out of every frame like a spectre with eyes as big as his stomach.

That green glob in _Ghostbusters_ didn’t have anything on the likes of old Rusty.

***

The next time Danny sees him, Rusty’s stretched out in the back of his car at a rest stop twenty miles outside of Barstow. A Padres cap, replete with shop tags, shades his face from the midday sun, and his breath comes slow and easy. Danny can’t remember a time he looked so at peace.

“Just catching a few Zs,” Rusty yawns from beneath the cap.

Danny smiles in such a way as to make Rusty furious: faint curl at the corners of his mouth, and before long, up and out until the flesh at his eyes crinkles. But Rusty can’t see him.

“Uh huh,” says Danny.

“Stop it.” And then, “Smug bastard.”

“I smelled the antifreeze all the way from the coast.”

“It’s just the radiator,” says Rusty. “Easy fix.”

“On an old bird like this? You’d be lucky to find one at a junkyard in Pismo.”

“Don’t tell me: you know a guy.”

“Just one.”

“Good thing you were passing though.” Rusty coughs and pushes himself up with his elbows; the cap tumbles to his chest; a litter of In-N-Out wrappers flutter about him like autumn leaves. After a long moment, he blearily meets Danny’s eyes, and then lets out a low laugh. “What the hell kind of knight errant wears cashmere blend?”

“Would it were we all looked good in Kevlar.”

“Are you propositioning me?”

“Are you going to refuse?”

***

In the beginning there was a hand of five card stud. Two grand to ante, a pair of deuces backed by nothing more than a prayer, and a dealer who smiled just enough to make Danny’s skin crawl. Sure, he was in over his head. No surprise there, right? But on the other side of the table sat a kid with the luck of a kipper: five hands in and twenty-five Gs up. He couldn’t be called a cheater; he just had something to prove.

He wasn’t the only one. Danny swept back in with a gale-force bluff, managing to keep the kid guessing long enough to get his name, and then buy him a basket of hotwings. Nice and easy. In and out. Ideas tumbled from his brain like all the dreams of avarice, and three weeks later, they were in Cancun. Those sailboats never saw them coming.

Afterwards, it was back up to Boston for a publishing house scam, Montreal for a slice of perjury; Berlin and Monte Carlo and Belize. The kid had a thing for foreign cuisine.

Danny got used to carrying a jar of TUMS. He took Rusty to see the gang, Saul and Reuben and Max and Ollie and the rest, and although Danny’d be loath to admit it, every time it was less and less like showing off a prize greyhound at Westminster.

Back then, he let Rusty think he, Danny, was the best, that he could do no wrong while doing wrong, that he was impenetrable. Danny’s still trying to buy his way out of that one.

***

“For all the buildup, I’d have thought we were gonna have to rob the Met,” says Danny.

“Got your eye on a particular Monet?”

“Incan matrimonial headmasks.”

Rusty pauses for a moment, then draws his tongue across his bottom lip. “Good money in Incan matrimonial headmasks, is there?”

“Only if you can move ’em.”

***

Danny thinks of it like this: seen one job, seen them all. Be it a scheme in the Alps which culminates in a high-speed slalom chase or that one thing with the guy at that place, it all leads to the same spot in the end. If all goes according to plan, this means a beachfront in Bermuda. Today it lands him in cell block E.

One phone call, they say. He gets one phone call.

The quarter feels heavy in his palm, and the clink it makes as it falls into the innards of the phone is tinny and tried. He dials the only number he can remember, and somehow he’s relieved to reach Rusty’s answering machine rather than Rusty himself. The kid always did have a good phone voice. Damned if he couldn’t sell seawater to a mariner.

***

So back at the café, Rusty’s still thinking about that film. It’ll star someone recognizable, but earnest. Someone you’d trust to give you a good deal on that T-Bird you’ve had your eye on all these years, and who’d throw in the fuzzy dice just because he likes the look of you. (You’ll have the tires rotated somewhere else.)

I know what you’re thinking. What studio would back such a pile of manure? That’s where you’ll just have to take a leap of faith. Pay no attention to the weirdo with a chicken beneath one arm and a barrel of peaches beneath the other. It’s clear sailing from here.

It isn’t Nabokov, but it’s close enough.


End file.
